Explaining the Racial School Climate Gap: Evidence From Georgia

This manuscript positions school climate as a relevant school improvement strategy that has rightly garnered increasing attention from educational stakeholders on a national landscape. In so doing, I offer a critical, race conscious lens to the school climate literature by accentuating disparities in students’ schooling experiences across racial lines. Situating this exploration in a phenomenological variant of ecosystems theory (PVEST) framework, I examine a four-year panel of administrative data of middle and high school students in Georgia to better understand whether and to what extent students across racial-ethnic backgrounds espouse disparate perceptions of their schooling environments. In this study, I merge de-identified, student level responses to an annually administered school climate battery with school level demographic data to further explore variations in climate perceptions within and between schools. I replicate prior literature by showing that racial-ethnic minorities, particularly Black students, report far less favorable ratings of their schooling environments, relative to White students, on nearly all measures of school climate assessed. These results also suggest that variability in school climate perceptions remain when examined within schools, suggesting that racial school gaps are not fully explained by students attending schools in different settings. Further, I find several contextual factors influence students’ perceptions of school climate and the magnitude of the racial school climate gap, with Black teachers serving as potentially important protective factors for Black students. I argue that greater policy attention to school climate is unlikely to yield optimal and equitable returns for students of Color absent ancillary policy and practical prescriptions to the schooling conditions that influence disparities in students’ perceptions of their schooling environments.